Graphos Project

Episode transcript:

Andreas:
Welcome to Product: Knowledge, the podcast about branding and marketing innovative products that improve people’s lives. I’m Andreas Schwabe, director of media services at Graphos Product. Marketing is about differentiation. Everyone in business has thought about, rehearsed or delivered an elevator pitch about why you should choose their business. The largest differentiation you have may not be your product. In fact, focusing too much on selling your product features could be counterproductive.

Andreas:
Research is clear that people make decisions on an emotional level and then consciously rationalize the decision to explain it. But how do you make use of knowing choices are emotional? How do you differentiate your business emotionally? Ken Aber and Ian Chamandy wrote the book, “Why Should I Choose You? (In Seven Words or Less)” They’ve developed a process for companies to come up with more than just a mission statement. It’s a promise and an attitude. Graphos CEO Laurier Mandin talked with Ian Chamandy on Skype from Toronto to do a deeper dive. He started things off by asking what the magic is around the book’s seven-word subtitle.

Ian:
Every company and every product has an essence to it. A thing that makes it uniquely remarkable and then it has features and benefits that come out of that. But at the core is what its essence. And part of the problem is companies only think in terms of features and benefits, figuring out what those are and making sure that list is as long as possible to appeal to as many people as possible. Or they do think about what the essence is, but the process that they have for doing that is so superficial that it renders the answer meaningless. And then without the really good guidance of what is the essence, all of the rest of it falls apart.

Ian:
We called frontline people on purpose. You could say, “Why didn’t you talk to the executives whose job it is to define this?” But the thing is, what we wanted to do is we wanted to find out, even if an executive could articulate it well or reasonably well at least, did it make it down to the frontline because that’s where it matters.

Ian:
It doesn’t matter that an executive knows what it is. He or she is not going to be responsible for sales in the way that frontline people are. So we wanted to test the company’s ability to communicate itself as spoken by the frontline people. Basically every company got an F, and it’s because they don’t go through the process of knowing who they are. Where this knowing who they are, the book is called, “Why Should I Choose You?” because that’s one aspect of our process. But really at the center of our process is knowing who YOU are. Again, that’s a question companies don’t ask. And when they do the process, it’s usually too superficial.

Ian:
So what we often do is we recite the Oscar Wilde quote, “I wrote a long letter because I didn’t take the time to write a short letter.” Companies don’t take the time to write the short letter, so they write the long letter that’s rambling and sort of notionally circuitously captures what they’re about. And after you hear, after you read the long letter, you go, “I don’t really get it.” Whereas when you take the time to write the short letter, then people get it. So what we did is we said, “All right. The short letter has to start with a seven-word or less headline. And that seven-word or less headline has to be the string that ties everything together.” It has to be the common thread.

Ian:
When it captures, when it crystallizes everything about the company in a single compelling phrase, then that’s all the frontline people need. If they know who the company is and they’ve got some supporting underlying narrative or dialogue of what that means to its fullest extent, then they can just start talking about the company. You’ll talk to two different frontline people in the same company and they’ll tell you the story in entirely different way, but they will both communicating exactly the same thing because they’re grounded in who the company or who the process is. And so none of these companies were able to articulate internally what it is that made them uniquely remarkable. So everybody in the organization is left sort of stumbling in the dark.

Laurier:
Yeah. What’s amazing to me is that nobody seemed to know whether that question even was out there. Go ahead with the…

Ian:
Yeah, that’s the thing. Most of them don’t know that that question exists. Clients often say to us, what do we do to prepare? And we say, “You contemplate the question. If everything you do is a means to an end, what’s your end purpose?” And that sort of throws them for a loop because they all think everything they do is the means to an end. And what that question says is, “No, that’s the means.” Sorry. They think that that everything they do is the end. And we say, “No, no, no. That’s the means to the end. What’s the end purpose? Why do you exist?”

Ian:
Like Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why.” Why do you exist? What’s your purpose? What is it that makes you uniquely remarkable and express that in seven words or less so that everybody can understand it, everybody can remember it and everybody can repeat it.

Laurier:
I want to go back to the story about the company that you’re talking about, it’s a company called Interiors Inc. I believe, right? That has…

Ian:
Yeah, I gave the punch line already.

Laurier:
That has that statement. But what they came to discover was they don’t just create this industrial shelving in stores. They’re not just selling and cookie cuttering these plans. What they really deliver to their customer, which is those stores like Home Depot, is getting those stores operating and selling and generating revenue weeks sooner, which can put millions of dollars of revenue into the businesses earlier and create an immediate success as soon as a store launches. And take away that big fear of opening late. So to me, they went with “Opening Sooner,” which is it’s a take on “opening soon,” which you see in front of stores already and people get. It’s in the vernacular already.

Laurier:
Not seven words, but two words encapsulate so much about the value that’s delivered. And also for everybody within that company, they know that that’s the one thing that they’ve got to do. They’re recognized for it. They’ve sold this based on that this store is going to open sooner. So they’ve got no options. They’ve got it… if nothing else, they’ve got that—

Ian:
Absolutely. If you’re going to say it out loud, you’ve got to deliver. It was an interesting conversation because we had breakfast with the CEO one morning. I’ll give your listeners a context. This company does retail shelving. Home Depot builds a box, they go in, they put up all the racks, shelving, and when they’re done, the store opens. So that’s sort of the context for their business. And if you ran into the CEO at a party and you said, “Hey, what do you do for work? He would say, “I do retail shelving.” So we’re at breakfast with him and he said, “I know there’s a magic to my company, but every time I opened my mouth to talk about it, it sounds so generic, so banal, so like anything, any of my competitors would say.

Ian:
We said, “John, it’s because you don’t know what business you’re really in.” And to his credit without a delay, he replied, “You’re right. I don’t know what business I’m really in.” So when he said at the cocktail party, “I’m in the business of retail shelving,” he’s actually in the category of retail shelving. And there are lots of other companies in that category. What business is he in inside the category of retail shelving? And because they had been intrigued in business for three generations as opposed to their competitors who were in business for five or 10 years, they had developed techniques and processes and systems and procedures that got their project finishing really faster.

Ian:
So as you said in the lead in, if you can get a store open a week or two sooner, that’s a week or two of retail sales that they wouldn’t otherwise have. At the time for Home Depot, that was north of a million dollars a week for a store. So that was real money. And that’s when one of his executives said, “Purely, it’s a joke.” He said, “You know when our signs where it says opening soon, I want ours to say opening sooner.”

Ian:
Well, Ken’s and my jaw hit the floor. We just went, “That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant.” And then we bulletproof the core proposition, which is primarily making sure that it resonates at a deep emotional level, emotional level, not rational level. It resonates to the deep emotional level with all material stakeholders. But differently. It doesn’t resonate with all of them in the same way.

Ian:
So to a VP of construction, it says, “At Home Depot, I’m going to generate revenue faster.” For an employee it’s his bragging rights. When you think of retail shelving, you don’t think there’s a whole lot to brag about in a business like that. But now, if you are recognized as a company that is all about getting finished faster, that’s a cause, right? That’s a purpose. That’s really interesting to you. So you have two different stakeholder groups. You have your customer, the VP of construction, who it resonates with one way and you have your employees who it resonates with it another way. But with both of them, it resonates at a deep emotional level. When it resonates with all materials stakeholders, that’s when we know we’ve got the right core proposition.

Laurier:
And that emotional resonance is so important. It’s something that you devote a section in the book to talking about and that was another area that it really resonated, no pun intended, with me because as human beings, we’re not rational decision makers, we’re rationalizing ones. So we make decisions based on things we’re feeling, and what our gut is saying on our lizard brain. Our limbic brain and then we make the decision and then we go and rationalize it. And that’s where we might go back to those the features and benefits, but to me that was really meaningful. And that’s what kind of got me thinking along the lines of what is the biggest pain that my clients feel when they’re coming to me? Because they know that they have blind spots.

Laurier:
They know they have stuff they don’t see. They know they can’t look at stuff objectively. They don’t have the experience they need to make these decisions. So that was where I could see that it’s the stuff that we see that they don’t. That’s where we bring the value. It’s not just in the fact that we can put together strategies and do these other things, it’s that ability. It was that of the book. Even though that’s the part I felt I should have known because we spent a lot of time talking about how people make these buying decisions when we apply it to ourselves, that was what made so much sense to me is just understanding, “Okay. Well, how do people make these decisions?” They don’t necessarily know what it is that their biggest fear is at this point.

Ian:
Exactly. Which is why it’s so much market research doesn’t work. It was one of the interesting things for us in getting introduced to Simon Sinek seven or eight years ago. A friend of ours sent us an email saying you’re ripping him off or he’s ripping you off and you’ve arrived in the same place, same time. And it was the latter. But watching his TED Talk was fascinating for us because A, it validated this whole notion of the core proposition on both a logical level and a neurological level. But also, it was where we got introduced to this whole idea of emotional decision-making about how you actually make decisions in the limbic part of your brain, which has no capacity for language, which is why we’re up and struggling to say, “It’s sort of intuitive or it’s vague or I can’t really explain.” That’s trapped in your limbic system.

Laurier:
I can’t put it into words because the limbic system doesn’t have words. It just has these impulses and feelings.

Ian:
So the decisions are made in the limbic system, and Simon Sinek does a wonderful job in his TED Talk, his original TED Talk of explaining this. We’ve then got a university as a client and we were explaining all this stuff. And then we found out the specialty of the president of the university who we were talking to, and it was basically along the lines of emotional decision-making. We said, “Do you agree with that, that we actually make decisions in our limbic system emotionally.” And then we do after the fact rationalization of the decision in our cerebral cortex. She said, “I hate to say it, but it’s true.” That’s what the science did.

Laurier:
You guys have created a business around this. It’s called Blueprint Business Architecture. So you have a process to help businesses flush this out. What does the process look like? How long is that?

Ian:
Sure. It is six sessions of a half day each. It’s done in our office. Our office is in the night’s brownstone house in Midtown Toronto. Nice living room, core couches all facing each other. We sit in a circle. Up to four key decision makers from the company. One of whom must be the CEO. We won’t do a blueprint without the CEO. And so we do six sessions of three hours each, usually a week apart. That’s a great amount of time. In between sessions, everyone is thinking about stuff, and the conversation is percolating.

Ian:
So we actually start the next session farther ahead than we finished the last one. So that’s sort of the core is it all done in conversation. And then at the end of it, over the successions, we’ve produced a 20 or 25 pages of stream of consciousness notes. But we have established the core proposition, the seven words or less. We’ve used it to modify the business architecture or the operations of the company, and then we’ve also used it to create what we call the core story, which is the top level strategic narrative of the organization.

Ian:
So what we say as a blueprint guides everything that you do and say. And so that’s why we’ve got steps two and three. Everything you do is your business architecture, your operations day to day machinations of the company. Everything you say is your branding, your marketing, your sales, et cetera, et cetera. And so there is an element of the blueprint that extends to your operations influencing how they work and an element that extends to your communications guiding what you say and how you say it.

Laurier:
And that part is really important, like the part where you’re embedding it into the culture and you’re creating a business architecture so that it’s not just in a Google doc somewhere or it’s on the website. But when your people are out there like all the people you talk to on those phone calls, they need to know that answer. They need to know and really be behind the messaging so that it’s not just more garbage texts that’s-

Ian:
Yeah. More word salad.

Laurier:
Yeah.

Ian:
When we do the business architecture, we say, “Okay, this is who you are in seven words or less,” and we look at each part of the business and we say, “Is this part aligned with who you are?” And if the answer is, “Yes, we don’t touch it. That’s great.” And if the answer is no, we say, “What do we need to do to get this part of the business into alignment with who you are?” And that’s how we get all the parts of the business working in lock step towards a common goal. And then for the core story, there are six questions that we have to answer. They’re very difficult questions to answer in a short form. But that’s what we have to do. We have to get them down to between five and seven bullet points and then what they do is they form this narrative.

Ian:
In the business architecture part of the blueprint, we never know what parts of the business are going to have to change until we’re well in to the blueprint except for two parts. We always know that a cultural embedding of the blueprint and the culture of the company is a critical next step, and embedding the blueprint into the marketing story is always an important next step, because the marketing and sales story always changes as a result of the blueprint because it’s so much more powerful. It’s so much more focused, and it’s so much more powerful, and companies usually want it rushed to get that onto their website because they’re excited now that they can explain their company for the first time.

Laurier:
Yeah. There could be a direct connection between having that unique identity and revenue streams, and ideally even overall sales, right? How does that come about? How does that come about when you have changes in prospect and it changes everything?

Ian:
I’ll give you a great example of that. We got called by this company called Eckler. Eckler is a mid-sized actuarial firm that specializes in defined benefit pension. Never in my life did I thought that I would get into the Arcana of pension plans and that sort of thing, but here we were with Eckler and as most people know who deal with these things, defined benefit, tensions are very expensive and onerous for a company. So they’re all switching to find contribution and you don’t need actuaries for that. You need actuaries big time for defined benefit pensions, you don’t need them for what the world is turning to.

Ian:
So Eckler when they came to us they said, “We see our cool future disappearing and figure that we have five to seven years to play out this run but then we’re going to be in deep trouble.” And we said, “You need to know who you are at your core and that will tell you where to go next.” We were stunned when actuaries said yes to that because… I mean, I can tell you this joke about actuaries because they told us. They said, “How do you know when an actuary is an extrovert? When they look at your shoes, when they’re talking to you rather than their own.”

Ian:
So this is a very risk adverse community, and they decided to go ahead with this non-traditional preface. And where it got really interesting, we got them to talk and talk and talk, and we said, “Okay, here’s what we heard in summary. Your clients, the CEO and the CFO of a company have to figure out what to do now with big chunks of money that are critical in the future.” And they said, “Right.”

Ian:
“You create mathematical models that help them figure out what decisions to make now about where big chunks of money are going to go in the future. That’s correct. And you’ve given us these three compelling reasons why your mathematical model are better than your competitors.” And they said, “That’s right.” We said, “Well, it sounds like you’re in the business of predicting the future,” and all of their heads blew off. The tops of your heads blew off because that was just way too provocative a statement for them.

Ian:
But where the conversation got to was, “No, you don’t predict the future. But what you do is you create a greater degree of certainty about the future.” That’s what your mathematical models do. And if you don’t create a greater degree of certainty and the confidence and decision making confidence that comes with that, then you have no value to the CEO or the CFO. So they adopted creating a greater degree of certainty as their core proposition.

Ian:
Now, to your original point about the impact on sales. When you are an actuary or a specialist in defined benefit pensions, your world is narrow and getting narrower by the day. But when you are in the business of creating a greater degree of certainty, all of a sudden it’s sort of like the blinders that race horses were to restrict their view. Well, we all have blinders on about our business. You do, we do. Everybody does. And whether those blinders are narrow or wide is dependent on how you define your business.

Ian:
They had a definition that… Or sorry. They came up with the definition that widened the blinders because before they had to find customers who needed their services and defined benefit pensions. Now, they need customers who are experiencing uncertainty, don’t know how to resolve that, but that uncertainty can be resolved by mathematical model. So all of a sudden, the blinders widened, and opportunities for business that always existed for you, but you never saw because of how narrowly you defined your business.

Ian:
But you define it in this broader way that is totally relevant to your core skillset, and all of a sudden you see new opportunities for business that you never saw before. When you know exactly who you should be talking to, you discover that that’s a much bigger group, right? So you’re afraid of getting too narrow because you narrow your target group. But by getting narrow, by getting focused, you actually expand your target group because you realize how many people really need your product. You didn’t know that before. You only saw a small portion of the people who needed what you sell because of the limitations and how you defined yourself. When you have this more focused, but at the same time expansive definition, you see way more opportunities for business.

Andreas:
That’s it for this episode of Product: Knowledge and our conversation with Ian Chamandy, co-author with Ken Aber on the book, Why Should I Choose You in Seven Words or Less? You can get it on Amazon or visit sevenwords.biz. Visit graphosproduct.com where you can find out more about Graphos, our services, ideas or more podcasts and our blog. All our podcasts are transcribed for the deaf and hard of hearing, or for those who just prefer to read. Reach out on Twitter @graphosproduct or email us through the form on graphosproduct.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Andreas Schwabe.